now, do you have to format an external drive? i remember reading about running games off of a network. i'd prefer not to erase all the games i have backed up that work on 3.55, just for the few i have that aren't patched yet to work.

1. First use PS3 Game Updater to get the newest Update pkg for the game
2. Then fire up Pkg View and extract the BCUS98295 dir into any dir -lets just call it targetdir.
3. Extract psn_package_npdrm.exe into this dir
4. Create a .txt into this dir and fill it with:

Rename the .txt file "package.conf".
Where BCUS98295 is the Title ID of your game and Packageversion has to be the Number of the Patch you downloaded

5. run it via cmd with psn_package_npdrm.exe package.conf BCUS98295
-> this will create a new update pkg for your game -> put on usb stick an install on DEX 3.55 (don't know if you can also install it later)

You can use aldostools BdEmuPartitionTool.exe to make more than 4 slots as well, and different size partitions. But for that you still need to format the external drive. Not sure how it works with Network drive.

An easy way to do this is to download BDEmuPartitionTool and genGP3. Then you can use genGP3 to make a BDEMU image from your game and BDEmuPartitionTool to add more game slots and to manage putting games on and taking them off of your hdd. Plug your hdd into the right most USB port and set BD emulator to USB.

The biggest recommendation i can make is that if you're planning to use an external HDD, you should make 100% sure that it doesn't have permanent power saving features with standby/sleep/eco mode included in it's firmware. Different models will net you different results, you can even see the difference in speed by using a usb thumbdrive and some external drives.

You will find that some can net you even worse speeds than the usb thumbdrive (which i think is pretty much standard good speed ). And yeah, the BDEMU image method is the best to use for the newest games that have an update. Some don't work on dex game mounter and multiman, i think it's still a little shoddy by this point.